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China Factory Visit – Buyer Diary #35

Recently, a staff from ODM paid a visit to a factory in Dong
Guan. The purpose of the trip was to perform a check on the
progress of an ongoing project for a collector's edition poly resin box. During the factory visit, the staff was given a
tour of the factory and was able to have a glimpse of the production
process.

Large Scale Production

Automated Production

Staff Managing the Station

The first production facility that the staff visited during the factory visit was the
facility for large-scale production. In this facility, production is highly
automated through the use of machines. At the beginning of the production
process, the machines will create the basic body of the product from the
production mould. At each station, a factory staff is stationed there to manage
the machine and to check on the goods produced. The staff is also to conduct a
basic level quality check for any visible flaws on the product.

Printing Station in the Factory

Following this, the manufactured items are collected and
delivered to another department for the printing. The factory has developed a
special technique to print on the design of the product while achieving the
same desired painted effect. This eliminates the need for spray painting, which
speeds up the production process. The machine also has a built-in quality check
mechanism where it will reject the goods that are not of good quality.

Quality Control Centre

After printing the details onto the product, the finished
goods are taken to the quality control department where they go through another
round of stringent checks. This shows that the factory emphasizes heavily and producing quality products.

Packing into Individual Packages

Packing into Cartons

Once the goods have passed the final quality check, they
will either be packaged into large cartons or packed individually as per
customer requests.

Poly Resin Production

In addition to doing large production orders, this factory
also has a separate facility for orders that require more attention to detail.
This department mainly deals with items that are made out of poly resin and our ODM staff managed to understand the process bette through the factory visit.

Creating Poly Resin Items from the Mould

After the poly resin figure is removed from the mould, the
figure may have rough edges and some holes in them. Thus the staff in this
department will inspect the figures individually and take corrective action to fix
the flaws.

Sanding the Poly Resin Product

At the factory, we saw the factory staff carrying out
different techniques to perfect the figures. These techniques include
buffering, using sand paper, filing etc.

Painting of Poly Resin Products

After the problems in the figurine have been fixed, it will
be passed on to the painting department. The colors are painted onto the
figurine by hand, color by color. This is a long and tedious process thus such these items tend to be more expensive.